It’s a Time of Transformation

At the EMC CIO Connect Summit in Prague today we are discussing major challenges that Chief Information Officers are facing in today’s evolving businesses. We aim to empower IT professionals to identify new opportunities as enterprises invest in third platform technologies.

I think the EMC CIO Connect summit is coming at the right time because changes are ever so significant for the IT industry. We are witnessing the biggest wave of changes ever to happen in the history of IT, driven by mobile and social and the amount of unstructured data which is created in the world around us. This phenomenon is placing a lot of pressure on IT to build redefined infrastructure and is subsequently changing the agenda of CIOs across all industries.

This is why I believe we could not have found a better timing for this year’s EMC CIO Connect agenda. We will do our best as EMC to help our customers in their journey and explain where we see the industry heading while most importantly uncovering how IT organizations can change their behaviour to stay ahead of this transformation and stay competitive in the future

I’ve said before that IT used to be an enabler for businesses and that now it has become the business itself. As an enabler it had different requirements altogether, especially how to handle a business and how to enable the business to be competitive. However, now IT has become in many instances the central component of the business itself.

Take UBER for instance. The company is all about a piece of software application and they do not own any assets. But now it’s been valued at around 1.5 billion dollars. This is a major change of how businesses will start and grow. When IT was a business enabler CIOs had different priorities and ways of thinking, now successful CIOs are transforming their organizations’ behaviour. Hence the infrastructure transformation is no longer the only requirement for redefining business as you add social, mobile and agility you end up with a totally different perspective on what needs to change. If we keep doing the same things we do today the world of 2020 will be a mess. The infrastructure will not sustain the agile apps needed for the future.

There is still a constant need for enterprise IT departments to transform – more important than ever to transform into a more strategic role, where they are able to work more closely with other LOBs, speak their language and offer them a mix of services that the LOBs believe to be most beneficial to business objectives.

3 Areas of Transformation

We identified 3 important areas of transformation I want to portray here

Technology– CIOs need to shift their focus to understand how different third platform technologies can come together to aid business priorities in the Digital Era. They need to build their Digital Strategy.

Process– Once identifying the right pool of technologies, CIOs need to revamp the way they deliver these services to different business teams, while some could be offered by the internal IT team others could be brokered from third party service providers to maximize cost and resource efficiencies.

People– Most importantly, CIOs need to transform the way they approach their relationship with the LOBs. For this they need to speak the LOBs language, translate technology to more easily understood business conversation and help LOBs effectively measure the ROI from different IT investments in a manner that they are able to understand as well.

Today, business leaders turn to IT to create “agile” business environments apt for a rapidly changing business and technology environment. This is leading to a strategic change in the role of IT from being a mere service and support center to a value driven role as enterprises continue to look for means to ‘do more with less’.

The future will see more LOBs participate actively in enterprise IT governance, and CIOs are playing greater roles in business strategy formulation, injecting more technology-driven opportunities into the strategic mix. In these and other leadership forums, LOBs and CIOs work together to understand the flow of data, work, decisions and analysis across the enterprise.

EMC and our business partners are taking part of the vibrant, engaging discussions and network with your peers from the region about these disruptive IT trends.

EMC is one of the very few companies if not the only one where all the products are now cloud enabled. Right now we have the technology like the Cloud Boost to make Cloud deployment faster and the Spanning Backup to make backup of Cloud hosted data simpler and more secure.

That is a main reason for me to believe that the EMC CIO Connect Summit is very useful in explaining all of these insights to our customers and transfer an overview of our vision and how it will allow us to help customers power their business. EMC wants to help customers be prepared and agile for the upcoming times.